William Drennan (23 May 1754 – 5 February 1820) was an Irish physician and writer who moved the formation in Belfast and Dublin of the Society of United Irishmen. He was the author of the Society's original "test" which, in the cause of representative government, committed "Irishmen of every religious persuasion" to a "brotherhood of affection". Drennan had been active in the Irish Volunteer movement and achieved renown with addresses to the public as his "fellow slaves" and to the British Viceroy urging "full and final" Catholic emancipation. After the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion, he sought to advance democratic reform through his continued journalism and through education. With other United Irish veterans, Drennan founded the Belfast [later the Royal Belfast] Academical Institution. As a poet, he is remembered for his eve-of-rebellion When Erin First Rose (1795) with its reference to Ireland as the "Emerald Isle".
Enlightenment education William Drennan (an Anglicization of the Irish clan name Ó Draighnáin) was born in the manse of First Presbyterian Church, Rosemary Street, Belfast, in 1754. He was the son of Reverend Thomas Drennan (1696-1762) and Anne Lennox (1718-1806). With his older sisters Martha (Martha McTier) and Nancy, he was one of only three of their eleven children who survived infancy.
Like his father, Drennan studied at the University of Glasgow, a centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. Through his father's mentor, the Irish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), a new generation of Scottish thinkers had drawn on the republican ethos of Presbyterian resistance to royal and episcopal imposition to defend what Drennan called "the restless power of reason". Consistent with a popularisation of Hutcheson by his friend in Edinburgh Dugald Stewart that linked individual conscience in matters of faith with the collective right to resist oppressive government,Ian McBride (1993), "William Drennan and the Dissenting Tradition", in D. Dickson, D. Keogh and K. Whelan, The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism and Rebellion. Dublin: Lilliput Press. . p. 60 Drennan was later to cite John Locke's Treatises on Government as his "prime authority on politics".
After graduating with an MA from Glasgow, Drennan studied medicine in Edinburgh under the experimental chemist Joseph Black and William Cullen "the most influential physician of his generation". He then returned to Belfast in 1778 and set up practice specialising in obstetrics. As a visiting physician to the Belfast Charitable Society poor house, in 1782 he proposed smallpox variolation, the practice, then widespread, of inoculating the skin of healthy people with smallpox to prevent a more serious case of the disease. (Sixteen years later Edward Jenner advertised the much safer practice of using cowpox for this purpose, with a paper on his own inoculation experiments in England).
In 1783, Drennan moved to Newry, and in 1789 to Dublin where he quickly became involved in the patriotic and democratic politics of the capital agitated by news of the Revolution in France.
Radical democrat Volunteer and the Letters of Orellana
Sharing the sympathies of many Ulster Presbyterians (few without kindred in the colonies), Drennan greeted news of Britain's first defeat in the American War of independence (Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga in 1777) as cause to "congratulate the people of Belfast and all mankind". He joined the Volunteers. Ostensibly formed to secure Ireland against a French invasion, the Volunteer companies were soon arming and parading in support of the "inalienable rights" of Irishmen. A convergence of Volunteers upon Dublin in 1782 helped Henry Grattan secure London's recognition of Ireland's legislative independence, but failed in 1783 to secure parliamentary reform.
Drennan came to national attention with the publication in 1784 and 1785 of his Letters of Orellana, an Irish Helot in the Belfast News Letter. Addressed to his "fellow slaves", they were the earliest expressions of his support for political engagement with the country's Catholic majority. If the Irish parliament remained an almost exclusively an Anglican (Church of Ireland) assembly in the pocket of the Kingdom's largest landowners it was because no counterweight could be found in the absence of the great body of the nation that the English-dependant "feudality" had dispossessed.
Now was the time for patriot Churchmen and Presbyterians to display "zeal in politics and moderation in religion" and as Irishmen, "nurtured by the same maternal earth", to join with Catholics in a "sacred compact".
United Irishman In May 1791, as news of revolution in France, and its spirited defence by Thomas Paine, revived the spirit of Volunteerism in Belfast and its Presbyterian hinterland, Drennan proposed to his friend Samuel McTier a benevolent conspiracy—a plot for the people—no Whig club—no party title—the Brotherhood its name—the Rights of Man and [employing the phrase coined by Hutcheson] the Greatest Happiness of the Greater Number its end—its general end Real Independence to Ireland, and Republicanism its particular purpose.In June, Drennan circulated in Dublin, and forwarded to McTier in Belfast a further document, outlining in greater detail the same proposition: an "Irish Brotherhood" that would overcome "the distinctions of rank, of property, and of religious persuasion" through a programme of public education and correspondence with like-minded societies in throughout Ireland, Britain and France.
At its first meeting in Belfast in October 1791, the "conspiracy", calling itself at the suggestion of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Society of the United Irishmen, resolved on the complete emancipation of Catholics and an "equal representation of all the people" in parliament. Employing, as Drennan had proposed "much of the secrecy and somewhat of the ceremonial of Free-Masonry", the Society spread rapidly across the Presbyterian districts of the north, to Dublin and, in alliance with the Catholic Defenders, across the Irish midlands.
At the first meeting of the Society in Dublin in November 1791 Drennan won unanimous consent for his draft of a solemn declaration or test to be entered into by every member.I, - AB in the presence of God, do pledge myself to my country, that I will use all my abilities and influence in the attainment of an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in parliament: and as a means of absolute and immediate necessity in accomplishing this chief good of Ireland, I shall do whatever lies in my power to forward a brotherhood of affection, an identity of interests, a communion of rights, and a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion, without which every reform must be partial, not national, inadequate to the wants, delusive to the wishes, and insufficient for the freedom and happiness of this country.
In February 1792 Drennan was identified as the author in the pages of the Belfast Newsletter by his father's successor in the pulpit of the First Presbyterian in Rosemary Street, William Bruce. Bruce saw the test as going far beyond what the town had celebrated in the American and French revolutions: Drennan was proposing universal suffrage. In Ireland, this would "give the Roman Catholics who are ten times more numerous as Presbyterians ten times as much power". Bruce recalled that, in his fifth Letter of Orellana, Drennan himself had cautioned that "the Catholics of this day are absolutely incapable of making good use of political liberty".Bruce and Joy, p. 135 Drennan denied inconsistency. The "circumstances of the times as well as the persons" had changed "in the very manner wished for": "to commercial interest, a middle and a mediating rank had rapidly grown up in the Catholic community" producing an "enlargement of mind", "energy of character" and "self dependence".Bruce and Joy, p.149
Already in 1790, Drennan had made it clear to Bruce that he was committed to Ireland's "total separation" from Great Britain and therefore willing to vouch for the Catholic majority. He had written to Bruce:... it is my fixed opinion that no reform in parliament, and consequently no freedom, will ever be attainable by this country, but by a total separation from Britain. ... I believe a reform must lead rapidly to a separation and a separation to a reform. The Catholics in this country are much more enlightened and less under the trammels of a Priesthood than is imagined—it is improper to keep up religious controversy, when all should make a common cause, and it is said that you take up too much time speaking against Popery.Yet Drennan harboured his doubts. In the wake of the April 1793 Catholic Relief Act, he complained privately that the Catholic Committee in Dublin had "two strings to their bow", one to deal with the government, the other to treat with the Society: and its strategy was to go with the one that would promise and deliver the most.
In May 1793 Drennan was arrested on a charge of sedition. In response to the government's suppression of the Volunteers, an address, published under the name of Marcus in The Rights of Irishmen paper in Dublin called on all active citizen-soldiers to stand to arms. Drennan was the suspected author. He was also being investigated for knowledge of meetings between his friend Archibald Hamilton Rowan (who had fled the country) and an agent of the French Committee of Public Safety, the Reverend William Jackson. Following his successful defence at trial by John Philpot Curran in June 1794, and as the leadership began to seriously consider prospects for an insurrection, Drennan appears to have dropped out of the inner counsels of the United Irishmen. To his sister Martha McTier Drennan wrote: "Is it not curious... that I, who was one of the patriarchs of the popular societies, should... be excluded and treated as a frigid neutralist, until I... throw myself, as other patriot suicides, into the gulf of a prison".
The enfranchisement of women
From his days in Edinburgh Drennan sustained a faithful forty-year correspondence with his sister Martha McTier. She read, sometimes in advance of her brother, most of the radical writers of her time, including Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Laetitia Barbauld.
It may be a testament to his sister's influence that when William Bruce protested that an "impartial" representation of the Irish nation implied that not only Catholics but also "every woman, in short every rational being shall have equal weight in electing representatives", Drennan did not care to disabuse him. He pleaded only for a "common sense" reading of the United Irish commitment to a democratic franchise. It might be "some generations", he proposed, before "habits of thought, and the artificial ideas of education" are so "worn out" that it would appear "natural" that women should exercise the same rights as men. But he allowed that, until that day, "neither women nor reason should have their full and proper influence in the world".National Archives of Ireland, Dublin, Rebellion Papers, 620/20/1. William Drennan, 'Plan of Parliamentary Representation for Ireland'
The paper of the Dublin society, The Press, published two direct addresses to Irish women, both of which "appealed to women as members of a critically-debating public". The first (21 December 1797), signed "Philoguanikos", was probably that of the paper's founder, Arthur O'Connor. The second (1 February 1798), calling on women to rally for the democratic cause, is signed "Marcus". New evidence suggests that this was Drennan.
The French Revolution and Catholic opinion